5 Artists to Discover at the Aichi Triennale 2025

As the 2025 Aichi Triennale opened, the clouds that towered over the Japanese prefecture threatened a thunderstorm, but one would be forgiven for mistaking them for plumes of ash. As curator Hoor Al Qasimi points out, there was a time when skies filled with smoke and soot would have been welcomed here as a testament to the area’s ceramics production, a sign of prosperity, industry, and hard work.

Al Qasimi, who is known for her tenure as president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, is the first non-Japanese curator to direct the event. Her exhibition focuses on our relationships with the environments that surround us in all their contradictions and complexities. However, this isn’t simply a show about climate change—many works dig deeper into the ways that human activity shapes our environment and how our environment shapes us in return.

Borrowing its title from the book by noted Syrian poet and painter Adonis, “A Time Between Ashes and Roses,” the sixth edition of the Aichi Triennale highlights how our varied brushes with nature leave behind traces, chronicling cycles of destruction and rebirth. But the exhibition is careful to resist a binary between disaster and prosperity, refusing to make any singular claim—despite the ever-intensifying horrors—about whether our current era is closer to the “ashes” or “roses” end of the spectrum. In doing so, the show reevaluates what it means to be “between,” encompassing sprawling timelines, imagined futures, and personal histories.

Dala Nasser’s monumental sculpture, Noah’s Tomb (2025), demonstrates this fluid quality of time. The emerging Lebanese artist combined the forms of three burial sites attributed to the biblical figure into a single sculptural structure using terracotta, ash, and cloth. With a towering mast draped in hand-dyed, jade-hued sails and a serpentine clay frame, the work simultaneously calls to mind ancient architecture and an ultramodern ark barreling toward uncertain futures.

Such epic, large-scale offerings dominate an exhibition that feels sparse compared to previous editions. Al Qasimi has gathered a roster of 61 artists representing 22 countries—down from the 82 exhibited in 2022. Perhaps as a result, this year’s artists have been given the space to find clarity in their varied interpretations of the theme. Presented across two major local museums and a clever selection of innovative offsite spaces, the Triennale prioritizes intricate and thorough considerations of its weighty concerns. Here are five standout artists from the Aichi Triennale 2025.

B. 1987, Hiroshima, Japan. Lives and works in Chiba, Japan.

Much of the work in the Triennale seeks alternatives to the dominant, human-centric perspectives on looming catastrophes, both climate-related and man-made, that define our era. Across her practice, Japanese artist Kubo Hiroko highlights forgotten mythologies and marginalized histories, particularly those of women. Repurposing industrial materials such as netting, mesh, and farming supplies, her sculptures resuscitate the heritage lost to war, societal collapse, and environmental disaster. For Aichi, she presents The Lion with Four Blue Hands (2025), a tapestry made from striking blue tarps that cascades down across three levels of the Aichi Arts Center (AAC).

A path winds through the image she pieces together in the work, past drowned towns, disease-stricken livestock, and ending in a mushroom cloud towering over a refugee camp. The floating head of a lioness watches over the scene. Her four disembodied paws make uncanny gestures: beckoning, questioning, casting spells. Whether this godlike figure has descended to guide or to judge is left vague, but the work reminds us of the non-human forms of knowledge that might offer respite to the crises we face.

Another huge mural-like work sweeps across the wall outside AAC’s Learning Center. It comprises over 800 small drawings made in collaboration with more than a thousand nursery school children from the surrounding area. The swirling mass of color on a background of blue is a testament to the intersection of art and community organizing in the work of Hawaiian artist Solomon Enos. However, it is his “Pala (Ripe)” series of paintings that best captures the ideas of human mutation and adaptation that emerge throughout the Triennale.

These imposing paintings imagine humans as just a small part of a larger, leafy organism. Richly illustrated in earthy greens and ochres, serene faces peek out of folds in fungus; fleshy stems and branches pose like bodies. It is a vision of humanity rooted in an organic, symbiotic community that echoes across the exhibition. For example, in the work of Japanese collective Ohkojima Maki, adorable deer/human hybrids work the land alongside animals, while the paintings of Kato Izumi show barely recognizable people playfully canoodling with the wealth of marine life.

Abbas, b. 1983 in Nicosia, Cyprus. Lives and works in New York, U.S., and Ramallah, Palestine.

Abou-Rahme, b. 1983 in Boston. Lives and works in New York, U.S., and Ramallah, Palestine.

War casts a long shadow over the exhibition, understood variously as human conflict as well as attacks on our environment and the land. Amid these interpretations, much space is given to the atrocities that have come to define the times we are living through. Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present an ominous room full of video work that contrasts the inhumanity of occupation with the power of music and dance. In May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth: Only sounds that tremble through us (2020–22), eerie, color-inverted clips of violent raids are intercut with shots of feverish dance and simmering basement jam sessions. The film’s thunderous bass shakes itself free from the room and reverberates through the halls.

During the opening, this work was also the backdrop to a riotously playful performance at local Nagoya bar, Mago, where Abbas was joined on stage by Ramallah-based musicians Baraari and Julmud. The footage flooded the basement with light. Slogans in Arabic and English, projected across the performers’ faces, made statements like “The land brings us back to life.” It was typical of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s project of reassembling audio and visual fragments into formations that create new possibilities for political discourse and radical resistance.

Of the many threads that unexpectedly knit different works in the exhibition together, one of the most common was coal. For example, late Japanese artist Yamamoto Sakubei’s bold paintings unflinchingly document social histories of life in the coalfields of his home, Kyushu, Japan. However, the ceramic work of Australian artist Yasmin Smith most gracefully captures the life of this resource across millennia.

Smith’s minimal, wall-mounted installation Forest (2022) arranges 11 ceramic-cast lumps of coal in a precise line. These 11 sculptures are each fired in glaze mixed from coal ash gathered at 11 different power plants around Australia. These plants source their own coal from quarries in the surrounding areas, meaning each sample is distinct—a unique geological record. The glaze that incorporates coal ash drawn from the oldest quarries shines bone white, while more recent samples (18 million years old) are suffused with the dark,earthy color of soil still rich with minerals. The gradient that emerges is a timeline told in color, tracing the development of coal, which is itself pivotal to the development of human history.

B. 1980 in Rosario, Argentina. Lives and works nomadically.